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Saturday, November 24, 2012

When the rivers run dry - Everybody chases short-term wealth even at the cost of destroying their long-term collective future.

When The Rivers Run Dry is about water, especially
fresh water – where it comes from, how it flows and what happens to it.
The news is not good, but it needs to be listened to, especially in Asia
– and nowhere more so than in the Indian subcontinent, which may be
heading towards a catastrophic scarcity of water even faster than other
parts of the planet.

Fred Pearce is an English journalist, currently the environment consultant of New Science magazine. He is a writer who knows how to craft a compelling narrative out of mind-numbing facts.

‘Get your head around a few of these numbers if you can. They are
mind boggling. It takes between 250 and 650 galloons of water to grow a
pound of rice. That is more water than many households use in a week.
For just a bag of rice… And when you start feeding grain to livestock
for animal products such as meat and milk, the numbers become yet more
startling. It takes 3000 gallons to grow the feed for enough cow to make
a quarter-pound hamburger, and between 500 and 1000 gallons for that
cow to fill its udders with a quart of milk…. And if you have a sweet
tooth, so much the worse: every teaspoonful of sugar in your coffee
requires 50 cups of water to grow… (G)rowing the crops to feed and
clothe me for a year must take between 1500 and 2000 tons – more than
half the contents of an Olympic-size swimming pool.’

This introduces us to the concept of ‘virtual water’: ‘In this
terminology, every ton of wheat arriving at a dockside carries with it
in virtual form the thousand tons of water needed to grow it. The global
virtual-water trade is estimated to be around 800 million acre-feet a
year, or twenty Nile rivers… This trade “moves water in volumes and over
distances beyond the wildest imaginings of water engineers”.’

Much of this trade is unnecessary and illogical. Pearce points out
that US is draining its aquifers only to export enormous quantities of
virtual water as wheat; Pakistan is pouring a third of the flow of the
Indus into cotton, and thus exporting it as virtual water: ‘the global
trade in virtual water… lies at the heart of some of the most
intractable hydrological crises on the planet.’

Much of Pearce’s reporting comes from the Indian subcontinent. His
travels take him to Pakistan, which is as dependent on the Indus as
Egypt is on the Nile. But ‘it is abundantly clear that the Indus is in
deep trouble. In the first years of the twenty-first century, the river
was largely dry for its final few hundred miles to the sea.’ He
attributes the rapid growth of Karachi’s population to Pakistan’s
hydrological crisis.

In India the crisis takes a somewhat different form: the green
revolution has led to an indiscriminate plundering of underground water
reserves. In Pearce’s account the electrical water pump is largely to
blame because it allows farmers to pump water at will, with highly
subsidized electricity. In Tamil Nadu he meets farmers who have stopped
farming and spend their days doing nothing but pumping up water, which
they then sell to tankers. They know the water will soon be exhausted;
the table is sinking so fast that they have to deepen their boreholes
every week. But no one person will voluntarily end this suicidal
practice – because that would only leave more for his neighbours, most
of whom are also pumping up water as fast as they can. As Pearce notes,
this ‘is a classic case of what environmentalists call “the tragedy of
the commons”.

Everybody chases short-term wealth even at the cost of
destroying their long-term collective future.’
The celebrated ‘white revolution’, which has led to a huge output of
milk in semi-arid parts of Gujarat, is also creating the conditions for a
water disaster. Pearce goes to meet a farmer who keeps a herd of cows,
which he feeds with alfalfa grown on his five acre plot. ‘I did the
math. He uses 4.8 million gallons of water a year to grow the fodder to
produce just over 2400 gallons of milk. That’s 200 gallons of water for
every gallon of milk… (C)alculated over the year, it means he pumps from
under his fields twice as much water as falls on the land in rain. No
wonder the water table in the village is 500 feet down and falling by
about 20 feet a year. What looks at first sight like an extremely
efficient local economy, making milk in the desert for a dairy that
trades across India, is in fact hydrological suicide.’

The notion of ‘hydrological suicide’ is hard to comprehend – this is
perhaps the reason why people tend to shrug it off. It is their
indifference that allows policy-makers to ignore it too. But
‘hydrological suicide’ is a real predicament; it happens. Perhaps the
most dramatic chapter in the book is Pearce’s account of one instance of
it: the shrinking of the Aral Sea, which has been described as the
‘greatest environmental disaster of the 20th century.’

The Aral Sea was not a small water-body: it was once the world’s
fourth largest lake – the size of Belgium and Holland combined – and was
fed by a river the size of the Nile – the storied Amu Darya. Its waters
were filled with fish and it was famous for its beach resorts; the
lands that surrounded it had extensive orchards and vineyards. Now it is
largely a desert, surrounding a few ‘hyper-saline’ stretches of water.
It was essentially killed by cotton: in order to cultivate the crop on a
large scale, the Soviet Union diverted the waters of the rivers that
fed it into irrigation schemes, reducing the flow of water to a trickle
by the time it reached the sea.

credit: treehugger.com

The sea was gone in a few decades.

The population that once lived off the sea’s bounty have now been reduced to penury; the rate of throat cancer in the area is 9 times the world average.
They too were probably unable to envision the prospect of hydrological
suicide, even as the water that sustained them was vanishing before
their very eyes.
Pearce is at pains to explain that the problem lies not in an
absolute lack of water, but in the patterns of water use. ‘Today,’ says
Pearce, ‘the countries around the Aral Sea – Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan – occupy five of the top seven
places in the world league table of per capita water users. Turkmenistan
and Uzbekistan, the two countries that take their water from the Amu
Darya, use more water per head of population than any others on earth.
The Aral Sea basin is very far from being short of water. The problem is
the simply staggering level of water use.’

In every country where cotton is grown in dry regions people should
know that cotton is a slayer of rivers. The warning should be heeded in
Egypt (where I lived amongst the cotton fields of Beheira a long time
ago) and in Pakistan where, as Pearce writes, the British, by building
the Sukkur barrage, ‘established what amounted to one giant cotton farm’
to feed the mills of Leicester.

But Pearce also has some encouraging stories, including some from
India. There is for example the interesting case of Pepsee, a kind of
plastic tubing for ice candies. ‘Sometime around 1998, somewhere in the
Maikal hills of central India, someone – perhaps a farmer with a
sideline of selling ices – started using Pepsee rolls for another
purpose: to irrigate the fields.’ This became a kind of indigenous drip
irrigation technique that minimised the loss of water through
evaporation. The idea caught on and Pepsee is now in wide use among
farmers.

Pearce’s best stories are those of rainwater harvesting. ‘In China,’
writes Pearce, ‘it was Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution that
began the revival of the ancient tradition of rainwater harvesting. In
India, it has been a mixture of swamis and scientists, schoolteachers
and even policemen.’

Pearce writes about many such figures: Haradevsinh Hadeja, a retired
police officer who has transformed the village of Rajsamadhiya in
Gujarat; Rajendra Singh, a government scientist in Rajasthan who gave up
his job to dedicate himself to water-harvesting; G.N.S.Reddy, a
Gandhian; Pandurang Shastri Athavale, a Vedic scholar who is known as
Dada to his followers. These are the real visionaries and innovators of
our day: if the world were a saner place they, and their movement, would
be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
For a long time now the world has been in the grip of ideologies that
celebrate ‘growth’ for its own sake.

One particularly powerful version
of this is the neo-liberal iteration of a philosophy that has
historically regarded air and water as ‘free goods’. Ironically this
ideology has found some of its most enthusiastic proselytes in countries
where water is in short supply – India, Pakistan and Egypt are good
examples. Egypt and Pakistan are both dependent on single river
systems. But Pakistan, as Pearce writes ‘abstracts five times more water
per person than Ireland does, Egypt five times more than Britain.’

How long can this go on? It is time to recognize that the idea of
‘unlimited growth forever’ is a fraud, a hoax. This book shows us why –
the planet will not allow it.

When The Rivers Run Dry is an exceptionally readable and well-written account of the world’s water crisis. It should be on every bookshelf.

___________________________________

When The Rivers Run Dry: Water – The Defining Crisis Of The Twenty-First Century, by Fred Pearce (Beacon Press, Boston 2006; there is also a Kindle edition).

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